Jacinto Benavente was one of Spain's foremost 20th century playwrights, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1922 for "the happy manner in which he has continued the illustrious traditions of the Spanish drama". Benavente's works have run on Broadway ten times, and were filmed eight times as silent movies and more than a dozen times as talkies.

He was raised in an aristocratic family and studied to become a lawyer, but when his father died, leaving Benavente a sizable inheritance, he dropped out of college, toured Europe, worked briefly as an actor, and began writing. After several of his plays had been produced to little acclaim, he had his first success with Gente Conocida (High Society), a biting satire of his own Madrid blue blood roots. His Los Intereses Creados (The Bonds of Interest), in which a wily servant manipulates his master as a puppet, became a staple of Spanish-language theater.

His 1928 play Para el Cielo y los Altares (Toward Heaven and the Altars) was deemed subversive and banned by the Spanish government, and during the Spanish Civil War he was held under house arrest. He later became an outspoken supporter of his nation's murderous Francisco Franco's regime, which tended to diminish his popularity.